


How Bucky Barnes Became The Sock Fairy

by Maia_saura



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: AU, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Gen, Happy Steve Bingo, I am a God of a [Minor Thing], Knitting, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-07-14 05:35:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16034057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maia_saura/pseuds/Maia_saura
Summary: It started out with Steve.  Everything always did.





	How Bucky Barnes Became The Sock Fairy

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to all the knitters. I don’t know how to knit. If you do, please teach me.

“If enough people believe, you can be god of anything…”  
  
\- Terry Pratchett - Small Gods

~~~

It started out with Steve.  Everything always did.

In the late summer of ‘28, Steve came down with something contagious and serious, enough so that neither Sarah Rogers nor Winifred Barnes could be convinced to let Bucky visit.

“He won’t even know even if you’re there,” George Barnes tried to and failed to comfort his son.

Winifred, ever the better strategist and long term planner, offered to teach Bucky how to knit to pass the time.  She told him that he could make some warm socks for Steve. She even got out some of the thick blue yarn that Bucky knew she had been saving for the winter months to make presents for the family.  

Bucky agreed immediately, grateful for his mother’s the implicit assurance that Steve would get better, that those warm socks would be worn.  

And she was right.  Knitting did help the time pass.  Bucky liked watching the needles dance between his hands, as the socks grew slowly, row by row, line by line.  

By the time Steve’s fever had broken, Bucky had made five socks of varying sizes all by himself.  (Two of them did fit Steve that winter. Winifred undid the others ones and made Becky a scarf.)

Winifred may have suspected that Bucky’s fastidious nature meant he would keep at knitting until he got good at it.  She hadn’t expected just how quickly and how much Bucky would take to this particular craft. Soon, she had to redo her household budget to account for buying up more yarn, but she couldn’t say no to her boy when he asked so little for himself.  

For every birthday Steve had afterward, in addition to patching up any holes (and there were always a few holes no matter how diligently Bucky got to them), Bucky would add length to the socks in a slightly different shade of blue. Each year of growth (each year of Steve being too stubborn to stop for Death) documented in a new stripe.

When Steve’s feet stopped growing, Bucky still kept up the tradition and added a single row of stitches to Steve’s socks each year.  

~~~

Bucky sometimes knitted for himself too.  When persistent worries kept Bucky up, (when Steve was sick again, when the Ryan brothers looked too keenly at Becky, when Steve got beaten again because he picked a fight with the Ryan brothers), Bucky hid in the kitchen and knit then undid the same sock over and over again in the darkness after the rest of the family had gone to bed.  The repetitive motion quieted Bucky’s mind.

~~~

When Bucky was sent to boot camp, he got stacks and stacks of letters from Steve. Steve drew him cartoons and updated him on the gossip in the neighborhood.  From his family, in addition to letters, he got yarn. Winifred had the girls help collect old sweaters and baby clothes from the neighbors to reuse the yarn.  

So when Bucky couldn’t sleep, Bucky knit dozens and dozens of socks sitting on his cot in the darkness.  His fingers finding comfort in the familiar motions of his needles, the tension of the yarn looping through again and again.  

Bucky left the socks in the bunks of new recruits who looked the most lost.  The ones who didn’t have as many letters (or none) from home. The real young ones who didn’t look old enough to shave.  

Bucky always made sure no one saw him when he left the socks, and he was good at it.  He figured he was honing his skills for when he needed to sneak behind enemy lines.

No one ever knew all the socks came from him though there was plenty of talk around the camp about the mysterious sock giver.  Bucky also watched with pride that the recipients of the presents always worn the socks. People traded plenty of things at camp, cigarettes, good razors, dirty pictures… but no one, as far as Bucky could tell, ever traded away the socks Bucky made them.  

The soldiers did make up some good tall tales about him.  ‘The Sock Fairy’ they dabbed him, and as the days passed, the stories got more far fetched.  Bucky loved hearing about particularly fantastic theories on how “The Sock Fairy” worked.

~~~

On the Western Front, it was a lot harder to get yarn, but somehow, the Barnes managed to get enough through that TSF continued to operate, even if it was less frequently than before.

When Steve showed up, a foot taller, a hundred pounds heavier, and just as stupidly brave, TSF had become almost a legend.  

On a bitterly cold night somewhere in Austria, when the Howlies were forced to camp out without a fire, they told Steve TSF stories to pass the time.

“The Sock Fairy, huh,” Steve said mildly.  He didn’t even look at Bucky when he said it, but Bucky knew Steve knew.  Steve never asked him about it. He did ask Bucky to add some new rows to his socks though now that his feet had gotten even bigger.  

~~~

Then Bucky died….

He died.  

He didn’t remember how it happened, except he was standing in a snowy valley, and there was a skeleton wearing a dark robe standing next to him.  It should be concerning, but he felt oddly calm about it.

HMMM, Death said. THIS IS INTERESTING.  

He waited.  

YOU ARE A GOD.

“What?  I’m not God,” He felt like he should be more shocked, except he felt kind of distant from his emotions.  Like they were books he knew he had read before but he couldn’t remember any of the plots.

NOT GOD.  A GOD. A SMALL ONE OF… SOCKS FOR LOST SOLDIERS? Death sounded uncertain.

TSF felt kind of lost himself.  “What am I supposed to do now?” TSF asked.  

Death shrugged.  An impressive feat for a skeleton.  

I GUESS WE WILL FIND OUT.  

~~~

Steve noticed Sam Wilson’s socks first.  They were green and hand knit, and Steve hadn’t seen a pair like that in a long long time.  

“On your left,” Steve said as he ran past Sam.

Up close, they still looked eerily familiar… handiwork he recognized…

Steve had to get a second look.

“On your left.”  Steve said as he passed Sam again, because Steve was kind of jerk, and he couldn’t help himself sometimes.  

Sam gave chase, because a challenge like that couldn’t go unanswered.  

Following their “run,” Steve properly introduced himself and learned Sam’s name.  But then, Natasha showed up before Steve could ask about the socks.

And after that...

Well, things got a lot crazy after that, and Steve felt like he lost track of the plot.  

A Red Room assassin tried to kill Nick Fury, Zola turned himself in to a room full of computers, and SHIELD was infiltrated and partly controlled by HYDRA?!

Before Steve could begin to process any of it, he was busting out Sam’s Falcon wings from Fort Meade and then his own uniform out of the Smithsonian.   

Then just as suddenly as things ramped up into action action action, Steve found himself in the eye of the storm, and everything stopped.  

Steve, Sam, and Natasha were just sitting in a stolen car outside of DC waiting for Fury’s signal to move in on to the Triskeleton to launch an assault against Project Insight.  

Sam was in the middle of a story about seagulls on the National Mall when Steve blurted out apropos of nothing, “Where did you get those green socks?  The ones you were wearing when we met.”

Steve had committed several acts of grand larceny with Sam since they first met, he figured he could ask about the socks.  

Sam didn’t immediately answer, but his hands gripped the steering wheel tighter.  Steve repeated his question in his mind, and wondered if he just broke some modern etiquette.  Was asking someone about their socks an euphemism for something else now?

Steve was in the backseat, so he couldn’t see Sam or Natasha’s face, and neither of them turned back toward him.  

“Do you have a pair too?” Sam finally asked.  There was a change in his voice… and Steve didn’t know what to make of it.

“I used to,” Steve said. Suddenly glad that they couldn’t see his face either. “SHIELD cut them off and threw them away with the rest of my clothes when they found me.  I guess they had to get me emerged in some bath thing pretty quickly…”. They had discarded them like they were just rags. Of all the things that SHIELD had done to him in those early days, somehow this was the most unforgivable.  And horribly Steve found himself on the verge of tears thinking about it.

“I guess you’d been gifted by TSF too, then,” Sam said.  

Before Steve could formulate a response, Natasha said, ”TSF is a ghost story made up by the Soviets to boost morale.  Soldiers have being telling stories about it for more than fifty years.”

“I don’t know about the Soviets, but TSF is real,” Sam said firmly.  “After I lost… after I lost my wingman. I got real low. I was still in a war zone, I still had a job to do.  But I…”. Sam paused for a few seconds. Then continued. “I found this pair of hand knit socks one morning on my bunk.  I wasn’t sleeping well, if at all. If anyone had come up to my cot, I would’ve probably knifed them. But there they were.”

Sam laughed a little.  “Riley had told me that one of his Ranger school buddies had gotten a pair from TSF when he missed the birth of his first kid.  Riley believed in TSF. I thought he was nuts. I bet he was laughing real hard at me somewhere the morning TSF gave me my own pair.”

Steve felt himself taking in deep lungful of breath, dizzy with Sam’s revelation, trying to understand—-

“I was given a pair of socks too,” Natasha said.  Her voice was even. “I had a little sister. We weren’t related, but she was in the Red Room too.  When I was seventeen, they made me break both of her legs. She was thirteen. The next day, I graduated and I found a pair of red socks on my pillow.  I burned those socks. And if I was given another pair, I would have burned them too.  I never saw Rooskaya again—until two days ago, when I chased her through the roofs of DC after she shot Fury.”

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said.  “I thought they would make you feel better.  You believed in me. You didn’t want to, but I felt you.”

Steve’s whole world shifted on its axis.  There, sitting next to him, looking thoughtfully at Natasha, was Bucky… wearing exactly the same clothes that Steve had last seen him wearing.  

“Bucky?”

Bucky turned to him as if seeing him for the first time.  Bucky’s eyes widened. “Steve?”

“I don’t understand…”

“You can see me?” Bucky asked, but then he was gone.  

“Steve, what’s wrong?” Natasha asked.  Both she and Sam had turned around now, but they were clearly reacting to Steve’s distress, not to Bucky’s sudden appearance and disappearance.  

Steve wondered what people felt like when they went crazy, because he didn’t feel crazy, but Bucky had been sitting right next to him.  

“Steve—“ whatever else Sam was going to say was stopped by all three of their phones flashing at once.  Fury’s signal.

“I’m fine,” Steve said.  He took a deep breathe. “Let’s move in.”  Whether he was crazy or not, he had a job to do.  

~~~

TSF didn’t understand what was happening.  Steve. Steve. Steve. Steve. Steve—

How could he have forgotten about Steve?  

He hadn’t thought about Steve...since… well since Bucky died, except now…. except now.

Bucky shook all over like a wet dog, and let the memories of Steve flood him.

Steve.  Steve. STEVE.  

~~~

Steve stood on the bridge of the helicarrier, and made a decision.  He wasn’t going to fight Yelena. She was victim too.

Slowly and deliberately, Steve dropped his shield.  

~~~

Steve was complete idiot.  

Bucky watched in horror as Yelena beat Steve to a bloody pulp.

~~~

Steve watched the helicarrier start to fall apart around them.  But Yelena had stopped moving, she was watching him, her eyes wide.  She looked so young.

And then, Steve was falling.

~~~

Steve was falling.  

Bucky dove in after him.  

~~~

Steve felt Bucky’s hand reach out to him on the border of darkness.

~~~

Bucky dragged Steve on to the bank of the river and tried to focus on something other than the horrible need to wrap himself bodily around Steve so Steve can never do anything that stupid again.

And also, the moment Steve woke up, Bucky was going to kill him.

HELLO.  Death said.

“You can’t have him!”  Bucky jumped up and tried to physically stand between Death and Steve.  

Death stared at him through his empty eye sockets.  Bucky had the uncomfortable impression that if Death had facial muscles, Death would be raising a eyebrow.  (If Death had eyebrows.)

“Um…” Bucky shifted uneasily.  

I WAS JUST SAYING HI TO YOU AS A PROFESSIONAL COURTESY.  I AM NOT HERE FOR HIM.

Of course.  Bucky felt like an idiot.  There were plenty of work for Death to do in these parts right now.

BUT IF I MAY.  Death continued.  YOU ARE A SMALL GOD.

Bucky stared at Death.  

Death shrugged.  

GODS GENERALLY DO WHATEVER THEY WANT TO DO.  Death said, sounding faintly offended. WITHIN REASON, Death added as an afterthought.

Oh.

Ooooh.  

~~~

Steve woke up to the crooning of the saxophone.  He opened his eyes slowly to the sight of Sam folded up in an uncomfortable looking chair next to his bed in what appeared to be a hospital room.  

“On your left,” Steve said.  Sam looked up at him and grinned.

Then Sam tilted his head to Steve’s left.

There, sitting in an even smaller hospital chair, looking disportionately large, was Bucky.  A pair of knitting needles in his hands, and an unfinished blanket in his lap.

“Bucky?” Steve rasped.

“Oh good, you can see him too,” Sam said.  “I was about to check myself into the psych ward downstairs.”

“How?” Steve stared at Bucky.  He looked exactly the same as when Steve last saw him.

“When I died, I kind of turned into a god,” Bucky got up from his chair, came over to Steve and took his hand into his own.  “Or maybe I already was sort of a god before I died. It’s kind of confusing, but I’m here now.”

“And you’re staying?”  Steve clung to Bucky’s hand as tightly as he dared to and not break anything, as if that act will somehow keep Bucky corporeal.  The rest of it didn’t matter.

“Till the end of the line, pal,” Bucky smiled, and squeezed Steve’s hand back.

For a long moment, they just stared at each other.  Neither of them willing to look away.

Then Sam spoke up. “I’ve got some questions.  Let’s start with what are you the god of exactly?”

Bucky waved vaguely toward Steve’s feet with his free hand.  And Steve suddenly noticed he was wearing his blue socks… the same pair that Bucky had made for him all those years ago.  He wiggled his toes inside the socks. Then he looked back at Bucky, who was smiling at him the same way he smiled at Steve when he first gave Steve with those socks, hopeful and a little uncertain.

Steve felt himself trembling, words unable to make it past his throat.  Because… Bucky. Bucky. BUCKY.

Whatever was on his face must have been enough though, because as he watched Bucky’s face, Bucky’s smile grew…

And just like that, the warmth from Steve’s toes spread upward, flowing and flowing through him—thawing him out from the inside out.  

Finally.  

 


End file.
